IT assets, particularly key ones, are often spread over very diverse geographical locations. In such an environment, keeping the network safe from external/internal threats and meeting compliance requirements are daunting tasks, especially when critical vulnerabilities are tracked manually for remediation, which can be very time consuming.
Existing solutions for vulnerability management suffer from several risks and/or challenges. These risks include leaving vulnerabilities un-remediated for extended periods of time, sharing specific vulnerabilities with malicious entities, providing limited/inadequate user access controls, lacking monitoring of data access/download, reporting inconsistently across different business units, failing to require accountability from teams who remediate the vulnerabilities, etc. The challenges include relying on manually managed spreadsheets for reporting and tracking vulnerabilities, storing vulnerability data on an unsecured/unsupported share-point site/shared network folders, providing weak access controls around vulnerability data, releasing vulnerability reports inconsistently on a recurring basis, consistently assigning vulnerabilities to the wrong groups, relying on emails/phone calls/meetings to follow-up on and/or escalate vulnerabilities, using a tedious and difficult paper-based exception/suppression processes, using email to approve exception and/or suppression requests, failing to provide compliance audit trails, lacking integration with any ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) processes, lacking scalability, lacking integration with a service provider's knowledgebase (used for remediation), etc.
Given the sheer size an enterprise IT environment can have, hundreds if not thousands or more vulnerabilities can be detected on a monthly basis, which further exacerbates the above-listed risks and challenges. As a result, there is a need for an automated vulnerability management and compliance system that can expedite and reliably manage vulnerability remediation.